Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits: A Century of Building Trades History (review)

This book will be a sobering read for labor educators attempting to navigate the current drift of the American labor movement. At the center of the author's narrative is the intractable decentralization of power within the building trades labor movement—an issue at the heart of the current rift between the AFL-CIO leadership and the Change to Win coalition. For the construction unions, the lack of a unified strategy produced a century of jurisdictional strife and left them seriously compromised when employers and their political allies went on the offensive in the early 1970s.

Palladino offers a history, not of individual building trades unions, or of the unique work culture of construction. Instead she gives an account of the AFL's Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), which sought to build solidarity and resolve disputes between the nearly twenty trades that constituted it when it was first founded in 1908. This appears to be an "official history," but like Palladino's excellent volume on the IBEW (Dreams of Dignity, Workers of Vision, 1991), it gives us the story, warts and all.

Building trades unions have faced a historical paradox in the use of their economic power. On the one hand they exercised remarkable control over local labor markets, through apprenticeship and the hiring hall. But this power also resulted in vicious competition between the trades for work during recessionary periods. This battle became even more complex in the post WWII era, when pre-fabrication, new materials and the challenge of non-union, multi-craft workers transformed the industry. The historical vestiges of craft autonomy created an insular union culture, jealous of craft jurisdiction, wary of bringing in new members, and at its worst, overtly racist. None of these characteristics served the unions well in combating the reinvigorated open shop movement launched by the contractors in the 1960s.

While the author's account of the first half century of the BCTD's work may seem arcane to the present day reader, her chronicling of the last forty years gives us a useful glimpse into the dilemma unions face when making strategic decisions. It is easy to forget that the recent attacks on labor commenced not with the PATCO strike, but with the Business Roundtable and Nixon administration led campaigns in the early 1970s. Palladino's account builds on Marc Linder's Wars of Attrition (2000), which analyzed the relationship between the Business Roundtable's attempt to contain building trades wages, the struggles to desegregate the construction unions, and Nixon's co-optation of building trades support for the Vietnam War. She uses interviews and documentation from contemporary BCTD leaders and insiders to supplement this. The recent debates over the COMET organizing program, the Building Trades Organizing Project and political infighting at the BCTD are well documented in the book, giving the reader a sense of the complexity of the problems, and the inertia of the organizations as they seek to define a unified organizing strategy.

This book does not attempt to be a comprehensive history of the building trades. Focusing as it does on the BCTD, there are important areas the book does not cover in detail. The central premises of the building trades institutional power—in the establishment of apprenticeship programs, in control of the hiring hall, and in the trades' development of relations with multi-employer associations—are noted, but not analyzed in depth. Important landmarks in building trades history, like the passage of the Davis Bacon Act in 1931, are sometimes noted in passing. Most importantly, I think a more in-depth analysis of the issue of racial exclusion is necessary to put the modern era in critical perspective.

Whatever its limitations, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits does give us a valuable institutional look at the strengths and limitations of craft union autonomy. From a contemporary perspective it is a look at the real problems inherent in "changing to organize," a slogan clearly identified with the current...